Fisherfolk along the Lake Erie shoreline are nervous. What has them concerned is the large number of dead fish washing up on the beaches.
It's not that the scaly carcasses are those of the much loved yellow perch or walleye … they mostly are sheephead, also called freshwater drum.
Not a good sportfish. They're messy and aren't especially fun to catch or great to eat, although I can attest that, if they are smoked right they can be tasty.
But, dead they are a problem too. Littering the beaches and marinas, they smell like, well, dead fish and they need to be cleaned up.
At the RV park where my family spends its spare summer time, the spring cleanup along the beach a couple of weeks ago produced a bucket load of dead carp and sheephead.
Not a bucket like you carry … a bucket like you put on a front end loader.
A Cleveland Plain Dealer report by Molly Kavanaugh last week quoted Jeff Tyson, a fisheries biologist supervisor with Ohio's Sandusky Fish Research Unit as saying that the kill is "Much more extensive" than they have seen before.
She said Tyson has sent samples to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in La Crosse, WI. The preliminary testing reportedly indicates that the fish are being killed by a viral infection but they have to do more work to figure out what strain of virus is involved.
Tyson expressed the fear that the virus came from ballast discharge from foreign ships. That would mean that fish native to the Great Lakes would have no natural defense from the virus.
Kavanaugh's article says that the last big fish kill in Ohio was about five years ago. That time mostly carp were affected. Samples of those victims also were sent out for testing. The testing was not very effective at that time, since the fish were too decomposed by the time they washed ashore.
She also said that a lot of muskies are dying in the Detroit River as well, but any connection to the situation in Lake Erie is not yet apparent.
You gotta wonder sometimes about the chutzpah of some people. Take Reggie Bush. Here's a kid who has not yet gained a yard in the National Football League but he already expects it to ignore, change or bend its rules for him.
Bush played college football as a running back for Southern California and wore the number '5' on his jersey. Now, he wants to continue to wear number '5' when he plays for the New Orleans Saints, who drafted him as a running back.
Problem is, number '5' is not in the range of numbers the NFL allows to be worn by running backs.
The league's Competition Committee is hearing an appeal from Bush and the Saints this week.
Peter King writes a column called Monday Morning Quarterback for Sports Illustrated's SI.com. In it, he offers five reasons that the NFL should give Bush his way.
King suggests that, for one thing, it's not that big a deal. He cites the case of Keyshawn Johnson, the number one pick of 1996, who gets to wear number '19', which is not a wide receiver's number.
King also notes that Bush's fans know him as Number 5. His reasoning is that since Bush is a hero in southern California the league would sell a lot more Saints jerseys with the number '5' than with some other number.
His article suggests the possibility that maybe Bush could offer to donate half of his share of the proceeds from sale of his jersey replicas to Katrina relief.
Finally, King said Bush should get to wear number '5' because Paul Hornung wore number '5' and the world did not come to an end.
I think one should question why Bush wants to wear the same number in the NFL that he wore in college.
Seems to me that, once a young person leaves college, either having graduated or just dropping out to start working, he or she needs to show that they have "Put away childish things."
Maybe Reggie, it's time for you to embrace the trappings of adulthood instead of childhood … and maybe wait until you have shown you can produce positive results before making demands.